Trying to teach Shakespeare through genre or period, over the years, has
become almost an intellectual dead-end, and has certainly never been a
successful
"come on" for attracting students to Shakespeare, although many
courses are still designed under rubrics such as, "Shakespeare: Comedies"
or "Shakespeare: Tragedies" or "Shakespeare: The Early Plays,"
etc. What I will offer here is a rumination upon rethinking the teaching
of genre as a vehicle for ethical thought in the classroom,
in relation to Billy Morrisey's hysterical "low comic" adaptation
of Macbeth--Scotland, PA--an adaptation which, through
its setting in a white trash trailer park town in the middle of Nowheresville,
America completely subverts the "high seriousness" and "high
stakes" of the original play while at the same time using the genre
of low comedy (including slapstick and "stoner" jokes) to
lay bare the original's tragic vision of what happens when murder
becomes "ordinary." I will conclude with a (preposterous)
consideration of Woody Allen as modernity's chief philosopher of comedy
and tragedy.

As a number of critics in 2004 observed, Paul McGuignan’s
The Reckoning, a film in which a troupe of medieval actors exposes
the crimes of a nobleman and the institutional corruption that facilitates
his offenses, invites its audience to consider the role of the artist in society.
Released not long after American poets were turned away from the White House
for fear they might advocate dissent towards governmental policy, this film
dramatizes the human costs of a state where religion plays the bawd to politics,
and ostensibly offers the dramatic arts as the first line of popular defense.
The aesthetic and moral transformation that endows the artist with such power
in this film lies in the painfully familiar trope of renaissance enlightenment:
only when the actors shift from miming the ontological platitudes of medieval
Corpus Christi pageants to exploring epistemological uncertainties of drama
centered on human experience does the hero acquire the “forensic”
power to challenge the system. Ironically, it is the film’s failure
that recommends it pedagogically. For, through the familiar narrative conventions
of the ripped-from-the-headlines crime drama that render this film, in the
words of one critic, “an above-average 1970s TV pilot,” the myth
of progress, both political and aesthetic, can be debunked—forcing us
to acknowledge the potential for both complicity and resistance, not just
in all forms of art, but also in audiences.

John Pendergast (Southern Illinois University Edwardsville),
"Silencing Shakespeare: Shakespeare in the Age of
Mechanical Reproduction"

I want to look at several silent era films of Shakespeare's
plays and consider what happens aesthetically to the experience of watching
the plays "in dumbshow" and what this experience suggests about
Shakespeare's position in the popular imagination at the turn of the century.
Specifically, I am interested in the role "spectacle" or
aura plays in these films, namely since Theodore Adorno warns that watching
an actor on film, or watching a Shakespeare play specifically, distances
both the actors and the spectators from the theatrical experience Shakespeare
intended. Perhaps this is true, but I think that considering the role of
spectacle in the context of Shakespeare's developing "highbrow"
status in a "lowbrow" (to use Lawrence Levin's terms) medium will
be revealing both theoretically and pedagogically.

Dan Brown’s Grail quest novel, The Da Vinci Code, is based
on a loose conflation of theories involving conspiracies among such groups
as the Knights Templar, the Priory of Sion, the Rosicrucians, the Illuminati,
the Masons, and the Roman Catholic Church. In order to create his fast-paced,
if indifferently written, novel, Brown had to take the wildly complex “higher
paranoid scholarship” of conspiracy theory and make it accessible
to a popular audience. His corner cutting has exposed a popular audience,
previously oblivious to conspiracy theory, to its implications. Ron
Howard’s film version of The Da Vinci Code, which simplifies
Brown’s novel, has created a cultural firestorm. Brown’s book
and, more especially, Howard’s film open up avenues for educators
to consider the history of the Holy Grail story and the ways it has been
used. The Da Vinci Code presents us with opportunities to consider
the relationship between the Holy Grail and conspiracy theory, to examine
how and why the Holy Grail has fallen into this realm of discourse.